Richard Neuberger Poster

In the months following the post we did highlighting the campaign items of Richard Neuberger a new item we had not documented before came up in our searches. 

 

 

 

This 21.5x 13.5 heavy card stock poster was issued in 1954 by the Neuberger for Senate campaign.  This is the first time I have ever seen this poster outside of photos of campaign offices from the '54 campaign. 

The Political Items of Moses Ross

 

 Oregon APIC Member Moses Ross passed away in April of 2025. He was a passionate collector who worked in politics and ran for office several times. He was a good friend to all he encountered in Oregon and the greater APIC community. He attended the Reno APIC National in the summer of 2022. 

 

Send Carl to Philly: The Buttons & Experience of one Delegate

In the summer of 2016 I boarded a plane for the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. For political junkies, a national political convention of any party is an experience to be remembered. I will have the buttons and photos to help my ailing memory one day as I reach my mid thirties. In writing this, I wanted to share my campaign experiences and political items I picked up along the way with my fellow APIC members.


I started my campaign about a month before Oregon’s congressional district nominating conventions began. In order to participate in these conventions you must declare a candidate caucus and register for the convention. This was after the Oregon Presidential Primary. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and celebrity Donald Trump won their respective primaries in Oregon. Knowing that competition in the First Congressional District would be fierce for Bernie Sanders delegate slots, I decided to file for a Hillary Clinton delegate position.

The Hobby: APIC Elections & The Future

Hobby posts are where we discuss the hobby of political collecting, organizational issues within the OR-APIC or National APIC, or just generalized discussions that might be important to the members or potential members of the American Political Item Collectors non-profit. 

2020 is not just an election year from America, but it is an election year for the APIC, the parent organization of the Oregon APIC (we are a geographic chapter). In the May edition of the Bandwagon (a publication sent out monthly), APIC members that are currently paid up on their dues ($42.00 a year) will get a ballot. By and large, these elections are a sleepy affair. Rarely is a race contested seriously. The positions seem even less desirable than running for your local cemetery board. Why is that you might ask?

2020 Political Buttons Part 9: Joe Biden Works For Series

The Biden presidential primary produced 4 really nice buttons for the four early contest states. That would be Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina. This follows with what the campaign produced in 2008 when they made a set of pins for Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina. Here are the 2008 pins.

You will notice that there could be two versions of each. One would have a blue union bug and the other a red union bug. So far I have only ever seen the Iowa pins with a red union bug. All of these pins are 1" It took me several years after the 2008 election to get 3/4 pins. I have yet to find an SC version, but I did pick up a red union bug pin for Iowa.  The Nevada and South Carolina pins seem to be the harder to get versions from the 2008 set.

Who was Manley J Wilson?

Oregon collectors and Oregon history buffs I know are telling themselves 'I think he was an Oregon candidate' or 'wasn't he in the legislature?' You would be correct on both of those fronts, but few people know anything more about Wilson than that. We hope this article will shed some much-needed light on his background for APIC members and the public.

Manley J Wilson represented Columbia and Clatsop County in the Oregon House of Representatives (HD 23) for four terms prior to being elected to the Oregon Senate in 1950. In the 1940s. Timber, Fishing and Farming were the mainstays of daily life in Columbia County. This is the community Wilson represented. They were union families and they were Democrats. Wilson himself was Editor of the Woodworker, the official publication of the International Woodworkers of America.

2020 Political Buttons Part 8: Bennet & Patrick Items

The New Hampshire primary has now come and gone. President Trump easily won the GOP contest. The Democratic contest had a fair amount of competition. In the end, Bernie Sanders and Mayor Pete seemed to be the top two finishers. After the problems in volunteer reporting of the Iowa caucus the week before, politicos were excited about the first state-administered primary. Instead of taking days to report results, we had the results within hours.

Each election night we see winners move onto the next state and we see some candidates bow out of the race. The night of the New Hampshire primary we saw three prominent candidates end their campaigns.  Andrew Yang or New York, Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, and former Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts. We will look at a small selection of items from the campaigns of Bennet and Patrick in this post. Yang had a large following and produced many items during the primary. That we will cover in a stand-alone post.

Bennet Items

Senator Bennet used bumperactive store to fulfill items purchased from his campaign. Two buttons were sold via the online store. They both have a CWA union bug on the face. One is a generic Bennet for America pin and the other is a neat Bet on Bennet button. It is possible this button with the gambling theme was intended to appeal to Nevada, which is next door to Colorado.

2020 Political Buttons Part 7: Cory & Castro

The first votes of 2020 have started. Some lucky folks in Minnesota have already started voting. December and January featured several notable exits from the 2020 race. The Iowa caucus is 13 days away. The field has narrowed considerably There are now just 12 active candidates. When we last wrote about Cory Booker items it was fairly early in the summer of 2019.  Not many new buttons came out later, at least on the website. If you were in Nevada, New Hampshire or Iowa you might have been able to snag a great button from an event.

This pin is 3" and seems to be from NH Booker efforts. It was given out to students going back to school and recruited as Campus Fellows in September as part of a campus outreach effort. I am not sure if these were also given out in Nevada, South Carolina, and Iowa.

2020 Political Buttons Part 6: Minnesota State Fair

2020 Political Buttons Part 5: Iowa Steak Fry

Had an amazing trip to Iowa for the Polk County Democrats Steak Fry event in September. APIC member hosted a couple Oregonians. The trip included a visit to the Iowa State Capitol building, a Star Trek Museum in Riverside, Iowa and many, many visits to campaign offices. Of course, you don't get APIC members in the same room without getting into buttons. Getting a tour of John's collection was amazing. He collects VOTE materials and Theodore Roosevelt. The wildest thing I saw was VOTE toothpaste. I thought I had seen everything. Here is a commercial from 1968.

2020 Political Buttons Part 4: Kirsten Gillibrand

In our last update on 2020 campaign items, we covered a series of candidates that had dropped out of the race over the summer of 2019. It seems that as soon as we hit publish on a post there is something worthy of an update. A few days after our last post, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand announced she was dropping out of the race for the Democratic nomination. She decided to because of the campaign was unable to qualify for the next round of Democratic Debates. She was unable to secure higher polling numbers and the required unique donors.

This was just as her campaign, only a couple weeks before this had begun to offer buttons in her campaign store. It would be interesting to know if she would have reached the 130,000 donor threshold had she offered buttons on her website a few months ago, instead of a few weeks ago. Here is the button that was offered on her website.

 

2020 Political Buttons Part 3: The Campaign Is Over For Them

We are fast approaching Labor Day in the United States. A traditional time for many candidates to be starting their campaigns and known as the time when the pubic during general elections, traditionally starts to pay closer attention to the race. The next Democratic presidential debates are not until September and the last debate was at the end of July. Between these two events, we have already seen several candidates drop out of the race in just the last week.  Seth Moulton, Jay Inslee, and John Hickenlooper have all dropped out in August. They joined Mike Gravel and Eric Swalwell after they bailed on the race in July. While these campaigns may not have made it to Iowa or New Hampshire, many of them did participate in the first two debates, had supporters and even generated a button or two. Let's take a look at the items produced by some of these campaigns.

Jay Inslee

The first presidential candidate to come from the Pacific Northwest in more than forty years sought to raise the profile of the climate change debate in the United States. Governor Inslee started his quest for the Democratic nomination in March of 2019 and ended it on August 21, 2019. He was able to qualify for the first two debates, but only met 1 of 2 qualifiers for the September and October debates. He was able to gather over 130,000 individual donors but not able to secure 2% or more in 4 qualifying polls. After coming to the conclusion that he could not raise his profile enough to raise his poll numbers he opted to drop out and run for a third term as governor of Washington. Here are some of the items, especially buttons, produced to promote his presidential campaign. There are a fair number of vendor items out there and right now you can also find pretty good deals on items issued by the campaign or supporters.

This first pin comes from a set of fifteen 3" inch pins created for an auction basket for the Multnomah County Democrats Dick Celsi Dinner & Auction. At the time, March 2019, there were only 14 candidates announced. The set included the 14 announced candidates and a pin for Jeff Merkley, who had just announced he was not running for President. The pins were included with a couple bottles of wine and auctioned off during a silent auction. Somehow, the one set auctioned off made all the way to the Political Junkie Ken Rudin! 

2020 Political Buttons Part 2

Back in May, we started highlighting the items generated by the 2020 presidential campaigns. You can read Part 1. We have prepared another installment with a run down of more items generated by the campaigns and grassroots groups supporting them.

Many of the campaigns have turned to a Texas company called 'BumperActive'. It is very uncommon for so many campaigns to use the same vendor as their official source of campaign materials. Some campaigns are not using this company (notably Joe Biden,  Andrew Yang, Marianne Williamson). Some campaigns even switched over from their previous vendor to BumperActive (Cory Booker). All this is to say, that there are a lot of items out there if you are interested in getting some from a campaign this cycle.

Portland Made Humphrey Stickers

We have recently come across a green HHH sticker made in Portland, Oregon. For a long time we had known of the smaller blue HHH sticker. Many members have it in their collections. Both of these stickers have Portland, Oregon union stickers on the face. Pretty neat to find a second sticker.

The two stickers have different photos of HHH in them, but with the same slogan. Note that the different union bugs are position in the same location on each sticker. It makes me wonder why a photo of Humphrey and Muskie were not used on these stickers, even if the stickers mention both candidates.

Norma Paulus Remembered

Norma Paulus was the first woman to ever be elected to statewide office in Oregon history. 1976 was the first presidential election after Watergate and voters made their feelings known throughout the country about the shenanigans of the Republican Party and President Nixon. President Ford would seek the GOP nomination and have to fend off a strong challenge from California Governor Ronald Reagan.

In Oregon, Republicans had held most statewide offices for decades.  Paulus was elected after Clay Myers had held the position. She would be the last Republican Secretary of State until 2016 when Dennis Richardson was elected. The Oregon Republicans had held the Secretary of State office from 1878 to 1985. Norma Paulus paved the way for women gaining statewide office in Oregon. She won two successful campaigns for Secretary of State and two terms as Oregon's Superintendent of Public Instruction.

2020 Political Items Part 1

2020 items seem to be popping up as fast as the campaigns announced. For a current list of the 2020 Democratic Presidential nominees you can visit Wikipedia.  The Republican field for 2020 currently consists of President Donald Trump and frm. Massachuttess Governor Bill Weld. We've covered some of the really early items from candidates that had announced in 2017 and 2018.

On to the items!

All four of these buttons come from the candidate's official web stores. You might notice that they all have the same union bug. At least half of the field of Democratic candidates appear to be using the bumperactive as the source of their campaign items.  You will have to visit the individual links in our campaign stores section to visit each store.

Vintage Lawn Art: Roberts & Whiting

 I have been recently gifted two vintage lawn signs from the 1970s and 1980s. The first one that was given to me was from the campaign of a local Tigard office holder. Her name was Patricia Whiting. After the creation of single-member districts, she was elected to the Oregon House of Representatives. The owners of Whiting's former home found the sign in the garage when they purchased it. I traded them a Whiting bumper sticker for the sign.

Trivia Question #1

Yesterday we are starting our Monday McCall Madness Trivia Contest! Every Monday we will send an email with a trivia question related to Tom McCall. We will take the folks that answer the question correctly, put their names in a hat and draw one on Thursday 3/7 and they will win a cool Tom McCall Related item! We just sent out our first email a few hours ago. If you were not on our email list this is your chance to chime in. Subscribe to our email list by filling in the form on the right of your screen and feel free to email us the answer at oregonapic@gmail.com

This week's winner will get an Elect McCall Bumper Sticker from his successful 1964 campaign for Oregon Secretary of State

The prize for this week!

The Question: Tom McCall was no the first McCall in his family to be an elected governor of a state. His grandfather, Samuel McCall was elected governor of what U.S. State?

Just send us the answer at: oregonapic@gmail.com and don't forget to sign up on our email list to get the question next week! You can subscribe by filling out the form to the right of this post.

McCall March Madness!

 

McCall March Madness starts Monday, March 4th!  To celebrate Oregon's Tom McCall we will be giving away one Tom McCall item every Monday in March! It might be a bumper sticker, book, photo or other Tom McCall related item. All you have to do is subscribe to our email list and answer the Tom McCall Trivia question when it is sent out that Monday. A random winner will be selected from the folks that answered the question correctly.

This contest is thanks to the generosity of the Oregon American Political Item Collectors and friends. To subscribe to our email list simply fill out the form that reads "Subscribe to our mailing list" and be sure to look for an email on Monday with the trivia question.

WAGONER Who?

Ever come across a button that you have no clue about? For many years I had no idea who Wagoner was. I knew it was an Oregon pin, only because several respected Oregon collectors had it in their collections. I finally found one at the Salem Armory several years ago. I recently found another one this last weekend at a shop in Oregon City. I decided it was time to find answers to who was Wagoner. A few years ago, this wouldn't have been possible. As more and more historical databases and records become available online, more information becomes avaliable to researchers. This time, it was a quick search result of the 1938 Election and Wagoner brought me a quick result. 

The old Oregon index made by the Oregon APIC Chapter in the 1980s noted the name of Clarence R. Wagoner. The first hit was in the online database called Our Campaigns. This is where I found that Wagoner had run in the crowded 1938 Oregon Republican Primary for Governor.

Eventual winner Charles Sprague won the crowded race with 48% of the vote and Wagoner came in a distant third earning 9% of the vote. While this was important to establish the legitimacy of the button, it didn't help me figure out who Wagoner was or what he stood for.